Thoughts on rationalism and the rationalist community from a skeptical perspective. The author rejects rationality in the sense that he believes it isn't a logically coherent concept, that the larger rationalism community is insufficiently critical of it's beliefs and that ELIEZER YUDKOWSKY IS NOT THE TRUE CALIF.

Social Sciences

Category: Gender Equality

TruePath12th September 2018

Math Isn't Immune To Ideological Censorship

Even after reading the counterarguments it seems clear that part of the mathematical community suppressed a mathematical [article] (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.04184.pdf) because it was ideologically inconvenient. As detailed in the quillette piece a paper accepted for publication (and actually published online) at the Mathematical Intelligencer was yanked from publication because some mathematicians felt it’s mathematical modeling of the greater male variability hypothesis might be discouraging to prospective female mathematicians and/or be picked up by conservative media.

Obviously (if the account is close to accurate) this is a horrific violation of academic norms. If there is anything that academic freedom means it’s that ideas can’t be suppressed because they might support politically inconvenient conclusions and it appears that is exactly what happened. What makes the whole situation truly absurd is that the people complaining about the paper were the ones doing the real damage to gender equality. Obviously, one unheralded paper entertaining a greater male variability hypothesis will have a lot less of a harmful effect than even the chance of a controversy over pulling it and the subsequent attention and overreactions1. Not to mention that explaining the gender imbalance via bias and harassment is far more discouraging to potential female mathematicians than invoking a biological difference in male/female variability2.

Some mathematical blogs critisize the argument in the paper (see back and forth in comments) but don’t allege it’s absurd or incoherent. A more substantial counterargument is made in the comments at ycombinator where it is suggested that a rogue editor deliberately pushed the piece through and directed changes to make it an overtly political piece supporting his own views. However, looking at the actual [article] (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.04184.pdf) reveals a piece perfectly appropriate to the Intelligencer or indeed many peer reviewed journals (perhaps excepting the relatively unspecialized nature of the content)3:. Moreover, if the editor had truly gone rogue rather than just having made a decision the board disagreed with she would have been summarily fired.

Of course, at this point it’s just one isolated incident (and new facts could always emerge to change the narrative) but it’s critical to express our disapproval now so this doesn’t become acceptable behavior. Ideally, I’d like to see some kind of resolution or statement of principles at an AMA meeting so hopefully we don’t need to move to a boycott or anything. Of course, political and ideological considerations do affect what gets published all the time but it’s critical to reinforce the norm that such considerations shouldn’t matter which makes our response in the few clear cut cases like this all the more important.

What to do about the original paper is more of a puzzle. I’m tempted to say that some other periodical should publish it merely to avoid giving even an apparent victory to the forces of censorship. However, there aren’t many equivalents to the Intelligencier and maybe it really isn’t a great model (though hopefully peer review could tell us). Also, at this point publishing the paper really would send a very different politicized message that other periodicals would be understandably reluctant to send. So other than moving quickly to the end of the journal format I don’t really know what should be done about the paper.

I do not expect many women inclined to fight through group theory and differential geometry (as well as any gender specific barriers) to be deterred because some mathematicians aired an idea about gender differences in a journal. ↩

Moreover, prospective female mathematicians have no reason to believe that conditional on being the sort of woman even considering going into math they are any less likely to be good than their male colleagues. Indeed, after conditioning they might expect to be better if it is true boys are more encouraged to enter these fields as well. ↩

Indeed, the inclusion of the appendix citing support for the greater male variability hypothesis seems necessary to insulate against criticisms that it’s perpetuating an unacademic, unsupported talking point. ↩

TruePath6th July 2018

Recognizing Harms Without Eroding Our Terms

This nytimes article made salient a certain harmful dynamic that often occurs in liberal circles.

There is some class of behavior like domestic abuse or sexual assault which has a relatively clear cut and highly salient definition, e.g., domestic abuse (unmodified) is physical violence by an intimate partner or family member and sexual assault is sexual touching despite a clear lack of consent.

Then people (correctly!!) observe that some related behavior which doesn’t quite fall under the existing definition can be just as bad and harmful and start using the existing word to describe that behavior. For instance, in the article below using digital smart devices to harass, intimidate and stalk ex-partners and calling it domestic abuse. Or calling situations where an older man puts a young impressionable woman in a situation she feels uncomfortable and unsafe and applying substantial pressure (or legal but unsavory social threats) to coerce her into sexual activities sexual assault.

Individuals who then protest that such behavior isn’t domestic abuse or sexual assault are often accused of not taking the suffering of such related behavior seriously and this creates a strong social pressure to expand the category. When those on the right stand up and mock such expansions as not really being domestic abuse or sexual assault it further cements the narrative that this is all about whether or not one takes the suffering of victims seriously.

This is unfortunate because measuring harm is not the only, or even primary, purpose served by such categorizations. Rather, such categorizations serve to clearly delineate certain kinds of blameworthy activity which can be clear adjudicated to provide deterrence (legal or social) as well as creating a clear, psychologically salient bright line which people will be reluctant to cross.

For instance, while having someone grab your ass without permission or tear off an item of clothing is obviously sexual assault it is almost surely less harmful and traumatic than being tricked into a sexual relationship with someone based entirely on lies and finding out they were mockingly journaling the entire course of their deception online. Yet the former is sexual assault, in part, because we can clearly define the offense while it is hard to draw useful lines about how much deception in a relationship or how much sharing unflattering details with friends justifies punishment. It’s deeply unfortunate but the sad truth is that the lack of clear standards means we can’t use punishment to deter all kinds of deeply harmful behavior.

When we use the fact that some kinds of non-violent behavior perpetrated by intimates are just as harmful as physical abuse or that some types of technically consensual relationships have, via lies or pressure, the same kinds of harms as sexual assault to justify expanding the terms we erode the deterrent barriers that make negative behavior less likely.

Yes, there are ways to hurt people we can’t yet deter well but every time social norms and fear of legal consequences cause someone to refrain from hitting their spouse or touching someone without permission that’s a victory. The more we blur those lines that are being crossed the more we imperil those victories. This doesn’t mean one shouldn’t try to introduce new terms that characterize other classes of behavior we also wish to deter but there is no cause to undermine the terminological clarity of the words we already have. Respecting such terminological clarity doesn’t deny the suffering of victims who don’t fall under the description. It’s just a recognition the world is far from perfect and we need to preserve our partial victories.

TruePath23rd May 2018

Not Ideal But I Was Way Off

In an earlier post I was very critical of the form the me too movement took predicting that simply conveying me too in the absence of any clear agreement on what was being claimed (did someone once ask you out in a way you found creepy or did your boss threaten to have you blacklisted from the industry if you didn’t sleep with him) would do more harm than good. I didn’t believe that merely expressing vague pro-social feelings of unknown intensity on social media would do much to persuade anyone to change their ways nor would it do much to change anyone’s justified belief in the prevalence of any particular kind of behavior. To be clear, I always supported the goal of eliminating the impunity with which many powerful men harassed I just thought it would require sharing emotionally detailed accounts of actual harassment to shift people’s beliefs.

Now I still believe I was right about many of the unimportant issues. MeToo didn’t directly do much to change people’s estimates of the incidence of harassment and I do think that the temptation for those who wouldn’t have otherwise judged their experiences as qualifying to participate (with the best of motives) might have lead some people to see harassment as less serious1 but all these effects were trivially small if real at all and I totally missed the real importance of the movement it created common knowledge that there was widespread condemnation of sexual harassment and that many people were finally willing to take accusations against powerful and admired figures seriously. Note, that conveying common knowledge didn’t require shifting belief in any particular frequency (of incidence or of people willing to stand up) and I totally missed this possibility[^facebook].

Was MeToo the optimal vehicle to accomplish this? I don’t know but it seems to have worked quite well and there is a good chance any little tweak I might have preferred would have undermined it. So I was totally, extremely wrong about all the parts that mattered and I believe in owning up to that. Indeed, I even vaguely remember someone mentioning the theory I endorse here on facebook at the time but I wasn’t convinced.

In retrospect I let my annoyance that people seemed to be just doing things because they felt emotionally satisfying rather than having any particularly good justification biased me so even when someone made the right argument I missed it.

For instance, someone assumed that those posting mostly just to be supportive were the extent of harrassment with rare exceptions. ↩

TruePath9th April 2018

How Good People Make It Impossible To Discuss Race, Gender and Religion

Listening to the Klein-Harris discussion about the Charles Murray controversy affected me pretty intensely. I was struck by how charitable, compassionate and reasonable Klein was in his interaction with Harris. Klein honestly didn’t think Harris was a bad guy or anything just someone who was incorrect on a factual issue and, because of the same kind of everyday biases we all have, insufficiently responsive to the broader context. Indeed, it seemed that Klein even saw Murray himself as merely misguided and perhaps inappropriately fixated not fundamentally evil. How then to square this with the fact that Klein’s articles (both the ones he wrote and served as editor for) unquestionably played a huge role in many people concluding that Harris was beyond the pale and the kind of racist scum that right thinking people shouldn’t even listen to?

Unlike Harris I don’t think Klein was being two-faced or deliberately malicious in what he wrote about Harris. Indeed, what Klein did is unfortunately all too common among well-intentioned individuals on the left and academics in particular (and something I myself have been guilty of). Klein spoke up to voice his view about a view he felt was wrong or mistaken about race but then simply choose to keep silent rather than explicitly standing up to disclaim the views of those who would moralize the discussion. This can seem harmless because in other contexts one can simply demure from voicing an opinion about controversial points which might get one in trouble but key ambiguities in how we understand notions like racist/sexist/etc and accusations of bias or insufficient awareness of/concern for the plight of underprivileged groups has the effect of turning silence into complicity.

The danger is that someone in Klein’s position faces strong pressure from certain factions on the left not to defend Murray’s views and those of his supporters as being within the realm of appropriate discussion and debate. Indeed, as Klein thinks that not only is Murray wrong but wrong in a dangerous and potentially harmful way it’s understandable that he would see no reason to throw himself in front of the extremists who don’t merely want to say Harris is mistaken but believe he should be subject to the same ostracism that we apply to members of the KKK. So Klein simply presents his criticisms of Harris and Murray and calls attention to the ways in which he thinks their views are not only wrong but actively harmful in a way that resonates with past racial injustices but doesn’t feel the need to step forward and affirmatively state his belief that Harris is probably just making a mistake for understandable human reasons not engaging in some kind of thought crime.

In other contexts one could probably just stand aside and not engage this issue but when it comes to race and racism there is a strong underlying ambiguity as to whether one is saying a claim is racist in the sense of being harmful to racial minorities or in the sense that believing it deserves moral condemnation. Similarly, there is a strong ambiguity between claiming that someone is biased in the sense of having the universal human failing of being more sympathetic to situations they can relate to or is biased in the sense of disliking minorities. These tend to run together since once everyone agrees something is racist, e.g., our punitive drug laws, then only those who don’t mind being labeled racists tend to support them even though there are plenty of well-intentioned reasons to have those beliefs, e.g., many black pastors were initially supportive of the harsh drug laws.

Unfortunately, the resulting effect is that failing to stand up and actively deny that one is calling for moral condemnation for having the wrong views on questions of race (or gender or…) one ends up implicitly encouraging such condemnation.

TruePath7th April 2018

It's Never Been About Numerical Equality

So apparently the Swedish government is going to pay women to edit Wikipedia out of concern that wikipedia contribution is heavily biased in favor of men. This misunderstands what’s desirable about gender equality in a serious way. While this may be nothing more than harmless idiocy it provides an important warning about the importance of taking a hard look at programs designed to increase gender equity.

There is no intrinsic good to having the same number of women editing Wikipedia (or engaged in any particular career or activity) as men. Rather, there is a harm when people are denied the ability to pursue their passion or interest on account of bias or stereotypes about their gender.

Now, if one believes that some activity discriminates against interested women one might think that artificially inducing women to participate (affirmative action, or even payment) is an effective long term strategy to change attitudes, e.g., working with women will change the attitudes of men in the field and place women in positions of power so future women won’t face the same discrimination. However, wikipedia actively encourages using unidentifiable user names, doesn’t require gender identification and there is no evidence of a toxic bro-culture among frequent editors. Thus, there is no reason to think injecting more female editors into wikipedia will reduce the amount of discrimination face by women in the future. Indeed, even if you believe that women are underrepresented on wikipedia because of discrimination or stereotyping, e.g., women aren’t techie or women aren’t experts, then paying women to edit wikipedia is wasting money that could have been used to combat this actual harm.

Moreover, there is no particular evidence that the edits made by frequent editors to wikipedia are particularly likely to be somehow slanted against women or otherwise convey a bias that this kind of program would be expected to rectify. Indeed, paying members of particular groups to edit wikipedia is an assault on wikipedia’s reliability. While I’m not particularly concerned about Swedish women the underlying principle that no one should be able to pay to ensure wikipedia is more reflective of the views of a certain identity group is important. I mean what happens to information about the Armenian genocide if Turkey decides that it should pay Turks to increase their representation on Wikipedia?

But why care about this at all? I mean so what if the Swedes blow some money stupidly? It’s not like men are suffering and need to be protected from the injustice of it all.

The reason we should care is that it’s shows in a clear and uncontrovertible fashion how easily well intentioned concern about gender equity can go off the rails. Given the potential blowback and murkiness of the issues there is a tendency to just take for granted the fact that programs which claim to be about improving gender equity are at least plausibly targeted at that end. However, this proves that even in the most public circumstances its dangerously easy for people to conflate ensuring numerical equality with increasing gender equality. Given that in many circumstances the risk isn’t merely wasting money but, as in affirmative action and quota programs, actively making things worse (e.g. by making people suspect female colleagues didn’t really earn their positions) we need to be far more careful that such programs are doing some worth those costs.

by Pierre Lemieux …women need state encouragement to do some of the one million edits that are made on Wikipedia every day. Presumably, this will promote the liberation of women. The Swedish government, or at least its foreign minister, wants…

TruePath17th December 2017

I think something that is missing in recent conversations about sexual harassment is the fact that this is part of a larger phenomena in which those with power can genuinely believe that their harassing behavior is ‘just good fun’ and that their victim doesn’t really mind.

It is the same thing we see when bullies (of either sex) tease their victims or when more popular friends denigrate the social failings of their less popular friends. Indeed, we see this in any number of contexts.

I think its important to understand this for a couple of reasons. First, if we want to actually fix the problem we need to understand that this isn’t just a matter of being a good person. Unless good people actively watch for this phenomena it seems they are psychologically vulnerable to thinking they are behaving appropriately despite causing real pain.

It’s also important because we need to recognize this kind of bullying and mean treatment causes pain regardless of whether it has sexual overtones. There are extra concerns when sexual issues are thrown into the mix but the basic problem remains the same. Also, by recognizing it as part of a larger non-gender specific problem helps remove the distracting gender war aspect from the problem and let people of both genders focus on what makes things better rather than how to demonize and blame the other sex.
Also, personally I’d love to know what underlies this tendency. Despite being someone who has been very much the victim of this kind of behavior its disgustingly easy to slip into it myself without noticing. Its like there is a kind of intoxication of social status that inclines one to ignore the feelings and concerns of those with less status than ourselves.

But if all the recent social changes accomplish is to raise the relative social status of women as a group without engaging in systematic change to make this behavior less common all we will achieve in the long run is changing who is treated badly rather than actually making the world a substantially better place….and the next group on the bottom may not have the kind of internal cohesion and social power to bring the issue to public attention again.

TruePath12th November 2017

Just Because You Didn't Demand Sex Doesn't Make It Better

The (now confessed) allegations against Louis CK are certainly awful behavior and shouldn’t be tolerated but they raise an interesting issue about the distinction between appropriate punishment and moral harm.

For instance, we set the penalty so high for some crimes (cheating on taxes or insider trading) not necessarily because those crimes are such atrocious moral infractions but because we need sufficiently high penalties to deter that behavior effectively. I’d argue that a similar thing is going on when someone uses their power over someone’s career to extort sexual favors.

Obviously, its morally unacceptable to ruin someone’s career for your own selfish reasons. However, we often tolerate people with power harming the careers of others out of pure pique, spite or other selfish reason. Now the individual moral harm of offering someone a choice (sleep with me or I hurt your career) is no more1 than the harm of simply hurting their career out of spite or pique.

However, this doesn’t mean we should reserve the same level of punishment (and here public condemnation is a form of punishment) for those two behaviors. The unfortunate fact of the situation is that without serious and strong punishment (legal or social) for, even implicitly, conditioning (non-sexual, porn-stars and prostitutes are hard cases) career success on sexual favors we risk creating an environment in which succeeding in an industry requires providing sexual favors. In contrast, when someone with power hurts a career out of spite, pique or on a lark we don’t face the same danger of creating an environment in which some people are systematically disadvantaged (we still face some risk of that). But, at least in an environment where demands for sexual favors aren’t the norm that doesn’t make the harm of the individual act greater.

Anyway, this is all a very long way of pointing out that while we appropriately punish people who condition career advancement on sex more it’s just as morally wrong to harm someone’s career for no reason or because you have some kind of personal or political disagreement with them. No, this is not an attempt to minimize the harm of behavior like that of Louis CK but, rather, to point out its no better when you screw over someone’s career because you dislike their politics, find their voice annoying or any other random (job unrelated) reason.

I realize this claim is arguable but I think it’s true on reasonable psychological assumptions. ↩

TruePath27th October 2017

An Alternative To Me Too

So in response to my criticism of me too someone suggested I should post about an experience I’ve had. I won’t post about a situation where I’ve done something useful to combat sexual discrimination nor extreme violations of the law since that isn’t particularly helpful in my opinion. The goal isn’t to signal moral virtue or share scary stories but, instead, to illustrate the ways in which unfair treatment can hide even in surprising places so we can excise those last remnants of sexism and discrimination.

So the story I’ll convey is about how at an academic institution I attended a friend of mine was repeatedly asked to perform administrative tasks and food provisioning tasks by an elderly professor because of her gender. Certainly, she could have raised a fuss but doing so would have caused her more grief than going along with the situation. What I think is instructive about the situation is that this reflected only the messed up priorities of one member of the faculty but despite this the fact that it was easier for all the other faculty members not to get involved meant that this was all it took.

As far as solutions go I think this illustrates the importance of not simply relying on complains or formal channels to solve these problems. Its important for people to be aware when their colleagues are imposing an unfair policy (gender based or otherwise) and say something. I also think it reveals how some people find they virtually never experience this kind of treatment and other people experience it frequently. While I don’t think it would have mattered in this case (female victims were in short supply here), I can easily imagine that a less stubborn/crotchety instigator would specifically target those individuals who seemed least likely to report/complain.

Anyway I’ve kept details vague to avoid identifying anyone but this is the kind of description I felt would be helpful as opposed to merely ‘me too’.

TruePath27th October 2017

If Anything Cis-White-Men's Lived Experience Makes Their Views More Valuable Than Those Of The Usual Victims

So frequently when social media gets involved in solving/addressing/recognizing racial or gender aggression (like the ‘me too’ trend) I see (or get) the attitude that its somehow not appropriate or bad for cis-white men (or some subset thereof) to offer their opinion on whether the effort is effective, morally justified, etc.. Not only does this attitude seem to lack any semblance of justification but it pretty clearly places the holder’s concern over their moral righteousness or social standing above the welfare of the group they claims to care about helping. Furthermore, by abandoning the hard won cultural consensus that it is the value of an individuals ideas, character and contributions that matter not their gender or skin color it risks less obvious, but more extensive, harm to the philosophical foundation on which we’ve built our turn away from bigotry and intolerance.

I recognize that this last point is only convincing once you accept that there isn’t a systematic reason that cis-white-mens’ views on these issues are almost categorically1 certain not to be worth hearing so I’ll start there and focus on the ability of men to contribute to conversations about harassment.

I’ll first argue that not only is there no particularly unique experience that living as a woman (even almost) ensures that one has nor is there any reason to think that gender, rather than Myers-Briggs type or socioeconomic status, would be the way to identify conversational participants most likely to understand the experience of being a victim of harassment. Then I’ll point out that it’s not even important for participants in the conversation to have a good idea of how or why harassment is bad much less what it feels like to experience it. All that’s really important is that people in the conversation agree that it is bad and work to eliminate it. Finally, I’ll point out that its primarily men’s beliefs and behaviors that need to be changed to make progress against harassment and, as such, the life experiences that offer the most value to conversation or planning are those that offer insight into men’s psychology and can identify what will and won’t be persuasive to men. Then, having demolished any claims this attitude has to epistemic virtue I consider why so many people seem to find it intuitively attractive despite the fact that it represents an abandonment of core principles in the struggle against hatred, bigotry and intolerance. In particular, I’ll suggest that we need to be careful not to conflate group membership with moral guilt nor confuse what feels just with what will be most likely to produce a more just society.

Before I continue, however, I should address two important points. First, I’m not talking about interactions where victims are seeking out a compassionate, understanding ear and may feel more comfortable with one gender. I’m talking about public discussion of matters of societal concern. Secondly, I’m aware of those little verbal catchphrases used by the social justice community to respond to criticisms of this attitude but disparaging the speaker isn’t a compelling argument. Simply acting like this question has already been decided isn’t sufficient. If you don’t agree with my criticisms you need to offer an actual argumentative defense.

Of course, I could be missing something so if you think I am please let me know.

Does Gender Offer A Unique Experiential Understanding of Harassment?

Now, obviously there are certain feelings or gestalt impressions which are difficult to fully appreciate without first hand experience. Just as I will never fully appreciate what it feels like to be engrossed in an Olympic bobsled run I won’t ever fully experience the exact way in which sexual harassment (or the concern that one will be harassed) are hurtful. Of course, different women and minorities also experience these events in different ways. Indeed, variation here is sufficiently large that I’m quite confident that I have a much better grip on the emotional experience my wife has when she gets catcalled or is otherwise hurt/slighted based on her gender than a random women pulled off a US street would have based merely on their status as women in the states. This already pokes some serious holes in the usual argument that, lacking the experience of living as a woman, there is some epistemicly critical aspect information about how female victims feel which is somehow denied to men but available to other women. In short, being female neither ensures you agree about the frequency or emotional impact of harassment2 nor does being male mean you aren’t constantly perceiving this behavior to be going on around you or that the empathetic distance from you to any particular female victim is greater than it is for other women.

Of course, it will be true that other women will be more likely to both be aware of when, how and with what frequency harassment occurs then the average man but that is no more an argument for discouraging men’s contributions than the fact that blacks in the US are less likely to have a college degree is a good reason to throw out applications from blacks for a professorial position. In both cases its absurd to use the individuals racial or gender identity instead of simply checking if they know what they are talking about. Even if we had to adopt the (repugnant) policy of picking some feature with which to screen potential contributors to the discussion we could almost certainly do better by instead selecting for culturally liberal men and women who have been the victim of bullying or other sustained emotional cruelty. While being bullied isn’t the same as being sexually harassed this criteria at least ensures that the selected population understands how many small slights or disguised verbal assaults can amount to an unbearable psychological assault for the victim even while, viewed in isolation by colleagues and authority figures, each incident appears trivial and clearly not worth reacting to. In contrast, there are no shortage of female religious nutjobs who not only don’t believe sexual harassment happens but think it would be a woman’s place to quietly endure it if it did.

Is First Person Experiential Understanding Important?

For the sake of argument suppose that it was true that almost all women and almost no men have a first person experiential understanding of what it feels like to be a victim or likely potential victim. What conclusions should we draw from that? Well, perhaps in certain discussions that turn on details of the experience and aftermath its plausible that women would be systematically better able to contribute than men. For instance, I think its probably true that people with first person understanding are better equipped to contribute to a discussion about how best to manage/alleviate the emotional aftereffects of such experiences. However, even in cases where the specifics of the experience are relevant, its not always true they help reach better conclusions or productively contribute.

For example, while my experience of being bullied in junior high certainly left me with a profound sympathy for the victims and concern about the issue it also compromises my judgement. I know intellectually that many bullies aren’t bad people (I even befriended some eventually) and the worst ones are often victims of some kind themselves but when the topic comes up in discussion I can feel my vision go red and I find myself advocating extreme solutions and dismissing promising compassionate interventions with bullies. Worse, when it comes to offering advice to prospective victims or parents I find myself assuming that every situation resembles a suburban catholic school in the Midwest during the early 90s and baselessly assuming that just because authority figures could do nothing for me they have nothing to offer (except disciplining the victim under zero-tolerance policies).

Yes, the fact that I’ve thought about the issue a bunch and feel strongly about fixing it means I probably have more opinions on the problem than the average man on the street but those are more than balanced by my impaired judgement about the issue and the reluctance I feel to consider certain possibilities3. Indeed, I’m quite certain that if I’d found myself talking only to other victims of bullying while everyone else felt it was inappropriate to chime in I would be making the situation much worse and be blind to potential solutions.

Moreover, even setting aside the downsides of first-person emotional experience it’s not even clear that understanding the exact nature of the victim’s experience is helpful at all. Returning to the analogy with bullying, it’s certainly true that there are aspects of how it made me feel, ways its affected me and details of how it happened that are hard to convey to those who haven’t had similar experiences. However, appreciating the precisce way I or others were hurt offers no particular advantage in combating the problem. Anyone who believes the experience is very painful (so worth addressing) , is capable of evaluating the evidence and can usually recognize the harmful behavior when they observe it is just as capable of contributing to the discussion about what can be done to make things better. The same reasoning tells us that discussing the best way to combat harassment doesn’t require any kind of first person experience or understanding merely the genuine belief that it can cause substantial suffering.

Benefits of Male Lived Experience

The attitude that men shouldn’t participate in these conversations is obviously motivated by the idea that women are particularly vulnerable to being harassed and harassers are particularly likely to be men. While we shouldn’t pretend there aren’t also male victims (especially given the greater stigma for reporting) and female offenders I’m sure that the vast majority of cases are male offenders and female victims. While many people seem to have the intuition this is good reason for men to keep quite when women talk about harassment, exactly the opposite is true.

Given this breakdown of victims and perpetrators there isn’t any reason to suspect that the experience of being a woman could offer any particular insight into improving the situation. After all, we don’t want women to change their behavior and feel obligated to avoid `tempting’ men into harassment. Rather, we want to figure out how to change the way men behave so they don’t harass.

In contrast, the experience of being a man and interacting with other men (in the absence of women) offers a great deal of useful information to improve the situation. For instance, despite being about as far from a bro as its possible to be even my experience immediately suggests some useful facts. While I can’t be sure that the little just-so stories I offer in this footnote4 are completely accurate they are the sense I get of some of the ways men end up harassing women. Obviously, by inviting more men into the conversation, especially those who have engaged in various kinds of harassment in the past, one could gain a great deal of useful information about the factors that cause harassment to happen and potential mitigation strategies.

However, despite the fact that in this case men’s life experiences offer more value to the discussion than women’s, that’s certainly no reason to discourage women for participating. Rather, both sides should simply share the relevant experiences they’ve had so everyone can evaluate a single larger pool of evidence and come to a more accurate conclusion.

Dangers Of Gender Based Evaluation

Alright, so discouraging contributions based on the contributors gender risks keeping important information and perspectives out of these discussions not to mention reinforcing potentially counterproductive (if totally human and understandable) emotional responses to the state of affairs with respect to risks like harassment. Obviously, the mere fact that this attitude impedes us from reducing the problem of harassment that we supposedly care so much about fixing is enough to reject it but slightly slower progress is the least of the dangers.

Least importantly, in the eyes of anyone even slightly critical of the social justice community and millennial leftists, this kind of attitude confirms all their most absurd stereotypes. Presenting this attitude makes life substantially more difficult for all those women struggling to be believed or convince someone to take action about the fact they are being sexually harassed (or even assaulted). Each time some cop in the Midwest or mine owner in the West runs across someone saying guys should but out because only women have something useful to say they think, “Huh, I guess it is all absurd BS just like Fox news says,” and the next time someone tries to report a crime or workplace violation they will be just that much more skeptical.

Moreover, as women should know there is an especially strong reaction when one is rejected from something on the basis of an irrelevant, but psychologically salient, property like gender. For some reason making categorical judgements based on certain attributes is something people find especially infuriating even if other judgements (e.g. being treated worse because you aren’t as attractive or aren’t a morning person) are no less unfair. You may not think men should have this kind of reaction when it is the privileged gender that is getting the short end of the stick but they do and it will push men away from the causes you care about.

Now maybe you think this is all silly. Of course its not a big deal if men don’t get to contribute to this particular discussion or you deviate from the principle of supposed gender blindness in this understandable way. And if you could control everyone else who would might use a similar justification to exclude men from some contributing to some conversation or issue that might be a good argument. However, remember that not only are there always extremists out there but there are a thousand different opinions about exactly which conversations men should or shouldn’t be excluded from and once you open deviate from the principle that each person’s contribution should be evaluated solely on its merit not the gender (or race or etc..) of the contributor someone else will take it too far or try to apply a similar rule somewhere it isn’t appropriate and eventually you risk undermining the broad consensus for the idea that incidental features like gender, race, sexual orientation etc.. shouldn’t be relevant to most decisions.

It doesn’t matter that you may have defined discrimination in such a way that it can only apply to policies that hurt the underprivileged. There is a large segment of the population who won’t see the difference between rules which treat people differently based on gender in what you see as a good way and what you see as a discriminatory way.

Intuitions In Opposition

Ok, so what accounts for the widespread intuition that men should be excluded from such conversations?

Well part of this is simply a response to the fact that, given a norm in circles sympathetic to harassment claims against male participation of course the men who nevertheless participate are overwhelmingly likely to be saying something stupid and offensive. However, that’s hardly a justification for having the rule in the first place. Sure, even in the absence of such a rule its almost certainly true that men will be over-represented among the dismissive and mocking responses but since such respondents won’t be inclined to obey such a rule in the first its not really a good reason for having such a rule. Moreover, there are any number of subjects where either men or women are particularly likely to be mean and insensitive but we don’t favor general gender based contribution bans.

Another part of the explanation is the ambiguity, in some circumstances, as to whether the conversation is truly about discussing useful fixes or taking actions as opposed to simply venting/bitching. I suspect that often people like to adopt the pretense they are interested in finding solutions or fixing a problem but really just want to vent and bitch. As such, almost any contribution from a man will be unwelcome as, even if they are offering helpful insight into how one might make the situation better, it will force those participating in the conversation to switch gears from simple venting to seriously considering proposals and useful actions. I can understand why people find this annoying but I think there are serious social harms in allowing mere venting to masquerade as serious consideration of social problems. When we vent we are liable to say a great many things (e.g. how about we have a curfew on men on college campuses) we don’t really mean. If we don’t clearly delineate what is mere venting from serious suggestions in online conversations people will get the wrong idea (at the very least detractors will use such ambiguous discussions against us). So, while I appreciate the need for such venting we already have good reasons to clearly distinguish it from genuine discussions about how one should make the world better.

Finally, I think many people have the idea that since harassment is a harm that is predominantly (though not exceptionlessly) inflicted on women by men somehow it seems unjust or unfair for men to also take a significant role in discussing how to combat the problem. This is problematic for two reasons. First, it implicitly assigns blame to all members of an identity group for actions taken by some members. Just as it would be unreasonable to say that a black homeowner shouldn’t be able to speak at a town meeting because it was black teenagers vandalizing homes largely owned by whites so too its unreasonable to act as if men as a group are guilty for the bad behavior by some members. This sends the message to young men that they should be ashamed of being men and that male sexuality is inherently somehow bad and harmful. But, even if we put this aside, this attitude places symbolism over actual progress. As I’ve argued above excluding men from such discussions reduces our ability to actually make the situation better and thats what should matter not the symbolism along the way.

While I will argue that men’s voices are, if anything, particularly valuable in these discussions all that is necessary to indict this policy is that men aren’t so obviously less able to contribute that it makes sense to screen them based on their gender rather than simply evaluating their individual contributions. We normally think that it is inappropriate, and often irrational, to use statistical differences in rates of criminal behavior, workplace productivity or even upper body strength based on race or gender to deny members of those groups the opportunity for an individual evaluation even when, as in the case of upper body strength, there are clear biological differences giving rise to a large performance gap. ↩

There are always women, despite the social pressure, who are willing to admit (or even speak up and say) that they experience harassment so rarely and find it so unimportant when they do that its a less pressing concern than more mundane concerns, e.g., whether people at their work get to annoy them by eating at their desks. ↩

For instance, emotionally I don’t want to believe it was primarily a midwestern catholic school thing and if I’d just switched schools things would have been orders of magnitude better. Though its obviously a good thing if most kids don’t have to endure quite that level of unpleasentness the idea that if I’d just be born a few years latter in California the same traits which I was mercilessly mocked for would have been accepted if not popular. My wife claims this was what things were like growing up in Berkeley but I’m still not sure I believe her. ↩

For example, the temptation to catcall, make a show of continued (unwanted) sexual advances and other kinds of ‘strutting’ are most acute when men are in a pack together. Despite the fact that the comments and behavior are putatively directed at the woman they are really a show put on to advertise masculinity/dominance to the other men in the group. As such, we ought to be careful before suggesting women should give as good as they get and shout back or otherwise retaliate against the catcaller as, by increasing the perceived risk (up to a point) of showing off that way, may also increase its apparent value. The crude sexualization talk, e.g., Trump and Billy Bush, is also largely a performative behavior for other men but in a very different sense. Here it is about making friends and being seen as a good guy. Shared transgressions, e.g., unflattering remarks about the boss, shared gossip, sexual exploits, are normal and unproblematic for both genders but things can go poorly if someone starts pushing things in the direction of harassing remarks as everyone else is reluctant to be the one who pulls back and offers criticism. Of course, in other cases the guys really are assholes and think harassment is an acceptable form of transgressive male bonding. ↩

TruePath17th October 2017

The Folly Of Mindless Identification

So at the moment there is a trend for women on social media to post ‘me too’ to indicate they have been a victim of sexual harassment or assault. The originator described the idea saying

If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me too’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem

While I understand the attraction of wanting to fix things by posting on social media this craze is about as useful as trying to fix racism by posting facebook updates saying ‘racism is bad’ making it at best silly. At worst it further discourages women from entering male dominated areas (STEM, CS, congressional politics) by increasing the level of fear and anxiety felt about harassment with potentially other negative rebound effects.

Presumably, the idea is that, by illustrating the number of women affected people will realize just how big a problem this is and extra resources or attention will help rectify the situation. However, one would hardly expect this to either convince those who resist the idea that this is a serious problem or who accept it but don’t realize their actions are part of the problem.

Of course, one might respond that the true point is to convince those who have been victims of sexual harassment or assault that their experience isn’t an isolated case and its a problem shared by many other women. Unfortunately, the mere fact that a large number of other women post ‘me too’ just isn’t a good measure of the magnitude of the problem. Knowing that many people have once experienced something that they are willing to construe as sexual harassment/assault when doing so lets them feel they are making a difference and gaining social approval isn’t very informative. Heck, if I were female and I believed this would help I would lie and say ‘me too’ even if I hadn’t so experienced it just to help make a difference.

So even other victims of sexual harassment/assault shouldn’t have their estimate of the frequency of such behavior elevated by this information provided they at least realize that many other women out there believe sexual assault/harassment is a problem that deserves more attention. Something they surely must to even process and understand this new evidence. After all, provided many other women believe that sexual harassment/assault deserves more attention they would be inclined to post ‘me too’ even if they only had a single moment of harassment once in their life (the people posting believe they are helping and want to be part of that solution by helping). I don’t believe that is what is happening but the point is that seeing other people post ‘me too’ should leave your prior about how frequent and serious the problem is roughly where it is.

Ultimately, then this leaves this whole trend down in the messy world of emotional effects where I fear there are more potentially. harmful emotional effects (discouraging or scaring women) as there are potential beneficial ones.

To be clear I do think it could be helpful if women posted descriptions of their individual experiences with harassment or assault and described how those experiences affected them. Seeing people describe both the frequency, severity and emotional harm is at least plausibly the sort of thing that could convince skeptics but this is something that women are going to be, understandably, reluctant to do. What I’m objecting to here is the idea that just be saying ‘me too’ and nothing else one is likely to make things better.